Shape of Things To Come

By TwinEnigma

Disclaimer: For fun and not profit - I obviously do not own Doctor Who or the Casanova mini-series.

Warnings: Set between the point Ninth disappears and reappears at the end of "Rose", and towards the end of the first part of the Casanova mini-series. Spoilers for the first part of the Casanova mini-series and both Rose and The Christmas Invasion.

He lingers at the edge of the party, a man in black, dusty leathers with close-cropped hair and ears that stand starkly prominent on the sides of his head. His face is dour in expression, but far from foul. There was a rather striking weight to the sharp masculine features that tended to draw the eye, as it were, and so too eventually drew conversation regarding the brooding stranger.

"They say he is a lord from the north."

"How far north? Is he from Belluno?"

"No, further! I heard he is from England."

"I heard he is a dissident."

"What do you think, Giac?"

Giacomo Casanova sips his wine and considers the stranger. He cannot place it, but he feels he has seen the man somewhere before, or recognizes the gravity of the gaze. Yes, the gaze, the way it lingers on the dancers and flickers from face to face – he knows this gaze. It is the gaze of a man starved of the fire of life, of passion, and searching for its ghost in the twirling skirts of silk and Venetian lace. He has seen this face before, in the solemn reflections of silver and glass. It is a despair he has felt keenly.

Ah, Henriette, he thinks. So this man must too have his own Henriette to pine for.

Then the man spots him and the strikingly solemn face breaks into a delighted grin. He strides across the room and confidently takes the Venetian's hand in his own, shaking it with vigor. "Giacomo Casanova, fantastic!" the man exclaims, "Why, you're practically a legend!"

"Yes, that I am," Giacomo agrees, sotto voce. He pretends to hide a cough and pipes up, "And to whom do I owe the pleasure?"

"Oh me?" the stranger says. "I'm the Doctor."

There is something odd in the lack of name that follows such a statement, a certain anonymity that for the very briefest moment sends a shiver up his spine. Instead, Giacomo smiles as he sips his wine. "Ah, what a coincidence! I know a bit about medicine myself."

"No, no, that's my name – Doctor, the," the man replies hastily and looks away, watching the dancers twirl. "Fantastic, utterly fantastic! To be here, at a party with the Casanova!"

A sudden stormy look crosses the strange Doctor's face, his face pinching sourly. "It is not the same," the Doctor admits, after a moment, "without someone to share this with."

"Surely, a handsome man of your standing may have his pick of the ladies," Giacomo suggests, gesturing to the giggling and beautiful painted faces of the court. He pauses, noting the unchanged expression of the stranger, and adds, "That is, unless, my lord has someone else in mind? Perhaps a very specific someone?"

The Doctor snorts and gives him a sharp look.

"Ah, a woman," he concludes and in so doing receives another glare.

"Rose," the Doctor says, after a moment. "Her name is Rose."

"Ah, a rose by any other name should smell as sweet," Giacomo quotes, sagely nodding his head and raising his glass in a small toast. "Is she beautiful, this Rose of yours?"

The Doctor turns his head to look at him once, twice, as though he scarcely believed the words and then looks back to the dancers on the floor, smiling broadly and shaking his head as if some grand joke had just been told. "Oh, no, no, she's not my lover. And no, you may not have her."

Giacomo laughs. "I see my reputation precedes me!"

"Your reputation endures for millennia," the Doctor quips, taking a cup of wine from a passing servant, and then he suddenly stills, as if realizing the oddity of the statement. "That didn't feel quite right at all. Not doing that again. It's just not me."

Much like Giacomo himself had once been ill-fitted to his skin, the Doctor, too, appears to be a man uncertain of his very person. There is an air of an unfinished painting to his every nuance and his words hint that perhaps he was once a fortune teller or perhaps an astrologer. A less clever man would have missed it, but Giacomo Casanova is and always has been blessedly clever.

The more he studies the silent stranger, now eerily quiet and drinking his wine with aplomb, the more Giacomo notes that there is something fundamentally alien in the man. But then, he has never seen an Englishman before, so perhaps this is merely the natural inclination of his race.

"I wanted to travel with her, Rose," the Doctor says at last, now well into his second cup. "She saved my life, you know – fantastic girl, she is, for a human – so I offered to take her with me, places to go, people to see and all that, and she decided to stay."

"Well, it's not much of a surprise if that's how you asked her," he observes dryly, peering over the edge of his cup at the dancers before turning back to strange Doctor.

His expression is one of profound confusion and displeasure.

"Ladies require a bit more than that, Doctor," Giacomo explains, thinking of Henriette and his own financial misfortunes. "Some ladies may be content to be loved completely only once and return to their husbands and houses and churches with only that memory as their prize."

He pauses, smiling as he sees one of his previous lovers, and gives her a salacious look, raising his cup to her.

The Doctor watches this exchange with distaste and snorts, finishing his wine.

"Other ladies," Giacomo sighs, turning away from the twirling dancers. "Other ladies prefer a more stable promise, one of wealth. Perhaps, if you gave your lady assurances of your station, she might be more inclined?"

The Doctor scoffs, "Maybe if I had a pretty face like yours, more like."

Giacomo laughs, clapping him on the back. "Well, we cannot change our faces to suit our fancies. Otherwise, I'd be out of a job." He pauses, cocking his head to the side as he considers it, and adds, "Well, maybe not. I am a handsome bugger, but the very manner of me is what completes the package, so to speak."

The Doctor levels a stare at him, one that is somewhere between sober and mad, and says, "What if I were to say I could change my face, my very nature at a whim?"

"I would say you've had enough wine, Doctor," Giacomo replies candidly.

"But suppose it were true," the Doctor presses. "Suppose that instead of dying, I change my very face, body and manner to that of a new man. Suppose that I could choose to adopt the appearance of another – say, someone like yourself, for example – and that I would just carry on through the ages until it is time to change again. What do you think?"

A shiver runs unbidden down Giacomo's spine. Something tells him the stranger is not just having him on, but that's madness, so he sips his wine and thinks.

"I suppose you might call it a sort of technical immortality," he says finally. "Though, clearly it would not be true immortality without keeping the nature of the original alive. It's all about the details, Doctor, the details."

"Well, what would you say if I chose to change into you?" the Doctor asks and hurriedly adds, "Not now, obviously. It's far too soon. I'm only just getting used to this face. But maybe sometime later on, when it's time."

Giacomo privately wonders if there is something in the wine tonight as he observes the other man and then finishes his wine. "Well, Doctor, I should wish you the best of luck evading my creditors."

The Doctor laughs.

"Seriously, Doctor, if it were true, it'd never work. You're too," Giacomo pauses, indicating the other man, "Well, you."

"I'll bet I can do it," the Doctor says, a knowing gleam in his eye. "I once took on the exact appearance of a guard who tried to have me executed."

"One chicken says you can't do it perfectly," Giacomo replies. "One of a kind, that's me. And no complaints about the chicken – that chicken is all I have right now."

"A bet it is, then," the Doctor agrees and they shake on it.

Many, many years, countless thwarted alien invasions, and a post-regenerative kip later, the Doctor finally sees his new reflection for the first time and doesn't know quite whether to laugh or not as he leans in for a closer look. The hair is a fair bit shorter and the eyes are brown instead of blue, but he knows this face, these nice teeth.

He's regenerated into Casanova.

And, belatedly, he recalls that he now owes the man a chicken.

Bollocks.

Oh well, worry about that later. He's a new man, with all of time and space to explore, and Christmas dinner is getting cold.

AN:

I AM SO SORRY. I HAD TO.

Ever since Eleven mentioned the bet and the chicken, I just... yeah. I needed to do this. Especially since it was implied it was Tennant's Casanova.